BIG MAN! It’s a nickname for burly, bustling centre-halves and centre-forwards, but few merit the epithet quite like Gerry Armstrong.
Burly centre-forward? Tick. Burly centre-back? Also tick, along with a few other positions over the years at Spurs, Watford, Mallorca and more.
Big character? Without doubt, having grown up in west Belfast at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles. In My Story, My Journey he told many a tale of scrapes settled with a right-hander, usually from Armstrong himself, on or off the field.
Big-game player? This is the man who scored the goal that secured his nation’s first World Cup appearance for 24 years, then bagged a famous winner against the hosts, Spain, at the tournament itself.
That June 1982 evening in Valencia changed the Ulsterman’s life and had reverberations far beyond football. “Back at the team hotel,” Armstrong recalls to FourFourTwo now, “there were hundreds of messages from around the world; from the Taoiseach of Ireland, from the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, from the Reverend Ian Paisley… telegrams came from everywhere, from all denominations. There were street parties across Ireland.
“That’s when Norman Whiteside’s mum [a Protestant] was invited by my mum [a Catholic] to go from the Shankill Road to the Falls Road for tea and sandwiches. Camera crews were there. It broke down all of the barriers. Politicians had tried for years to bring the communities together, but football did it in one World Cup game.
“I think that’s our greatest achievement from that World Cup
